Odisha EOW Busts Online Cheating Apps Using Photos of Celebrities, Freezes Rs 75 Lakh in Bank Accts

Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of the Odisha Crime Branch busted a racket of illegal earning apps that were using photos of celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar to lure the gullible. The EOW also froze Rs 75 lakh in 14 different bank accounts linked to this online scam.

These frozen bank accounts were linked to apps like Dice, Quickwrummy, Fly Aviator, Weonlinepro Three, MVP trader, Ft11, UNO, ForexDana, Live 22 cash, Aviator X, City5, Homer Alexander etc. According to sources, these apps had over 1.56 crore downloads.

These online cheating apps used morphed photographs of celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Sachin Tendulkar, Technical Guruji as well as logos of popular companies like Tata to mislead/ impress people on various social media platforms.

It was also found that some ‘social media influencers’, and TV stars/ celebrities were promoting/ endorsing these online ponzi apps.

It was found that these dubious apps were using UPI IDs to take deposits and they changed regularly.

The total transactions in the bank accounts of these dubious apps are of over Rs 1000 crores.

It is suspected that these accounts are also used in other cyber/ financial crimes related to online ponzi schemes, illegal digital loan apps, courier scam, sextortion, work from home scam, YouTube liking scam, rating scam etc., the EOW said.

The money collected from gullible depositors was siphoned through multi layer mule accounts and finally transferred out of India using crypto trade.

Most of these scams are operated from or have links in Dubai, UAE.